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NY Times’ Mark Bittman Praises ‘Global Weirdness’

Published: July 19th, 2012

By Climate Central

Mark Bittman made his mark as a food writer for the New York Times, and now that he’s also a columnist for the paper’s Opinion section, he still writes plenty about food. Just like Paul Krugman, who was hired to write about economics but branched out to a much wider range of topics, Bittman isn’t a one-note thinker.

Thursday’s column, for example, titled The Endless Summer, takes on climate change. We at Climate Central are glad to see it — not least because he spends a couple of paragraphs talking about our new book, Global Weirdness, which goes on sale July 24.

“The chorus,” Bittman writes, referring to voices calling attention to the dangers of global warming, “needs to grow bigger, louder and stronger. That’s why the forthcoming book (due July 24) from Climate Central, ‘Global Weirdness,’ is so welcome.”

And that’s just what we were aiming for: we didn’t want to slow readers down with lengthy, impenetrable science-speak, and we didn’t want to overwhelm them with apocalyptic scenarios that make them want to tune out.

The way we see it, the basic facts about climate change — what’s actually happening to the planet right now, what scientists expect to happen in the future, and why they think a warming planet will put people and property at increasing risk — are sobering enough.